The 100 Top Typefaces (in a Huge Sortable Table) | 2015

An Inspiring Collection of Fonts

FontShop sold a typeface collection called “100 Best Fonts” for a limited time in Germany a little while back. The website for this special promotion generously listed the names of all 100 best typefaces for graphic design with background information in German. When the typeface collection was no longer available, the promotional site itself retained a life of its own, serving as a go-to reference for graphic designers looking for inspiration. The PDF on the promotional website is a beautiful piece of design work, a nice visual resource, and just plain fun to look at even if you don’t read German. (NOTE: You can click the typeface names for more info)

How could this great list be improved? I was interested into what categories and classifications these classic fonts were placed, what foundries they were from, and what interesting insights might avail themselves if I could see all the data in one place. I also wanted one place to see examples of all these great typefaces, so I put those together too. Enjoy, and leave a comment!

About Douglas Bonneville

Douglas has been a graphic designer since 1992, in addition to software developer and author. He is a member of Smashing Magazine's "Panel of Experts" and has contributed to over 100 articles. He is the author of "The Big Book of Font Combinations", loves cats, and plays guitar.

Really appreciate your effort making this easy for most of the designers to get the best fonts from the rack. Got few more fonts that I prefer personally but didn’t find in here, could be proposed if the table accommodates more than 100 fonts 🙂

@ Florian: Goodness, I’ve been to that page many times and didn’t know it was clickable. And I’m a full time web-developer! Wow! To non-German passersby there isn’t much indication that there is more to explore!

I even wrote to FontShop.de about the collection in January and they replied that “…the list that you see on FontFont.de is just free publication that FontShop Germany created”. I assumed that meant the PDF! I just noticed now that you can leave comments, it seems, about each entry. But most of them are blank or have 1 or 2 comments only, and they are in mainly German. What a great idea that escaped most users…What does the German in the top left corner translate into? I wonder if it says “click me…” 🙂

1. At LEAST you had Copperplate Gothic on this list as one of the top fonts of all time.
2. Clearly it was an omission that Copperplate Gothic Bold was not at the top of the list. Helvetica? Really?
3. Comic Sans is a joke, we all know that isn’t a real font.

Hi Catherine: Proforma was a mistake. Thanks! Copperplate is a little less clear. Gothic means sans-serif, and while it has serifs, they are functionally almost negligible. However, I’m going to list it as a serif now. Thanks for your help!

The list is compiled from sales and usage stats from FontShop. There are many reasons a typeface would not be on this. More recent fonts wouldn’t have had time to gather enough steam to make to a list like this. Sansation is fairly new.

I was surprised that Goudy didn’t make the cut. And there are a number of fonts that pretty much shocked me that you included: Reporter not Spring? Hands not Good Dog Cool? I know the list could go on for days and I couldn’t agree more with most of the first 30, but towards the end…I think some newer fonts were given preference over their older counterparts not because they were better, but rather because the list needed to seem up to date/modern. Still, beautiful presentation and an absolute treasure for font selection and inspiration. Great job. Thank you.

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